SUNDAY EVILS | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 13, 1898

SUNDAY EVILS.

Says the Rev. Henry Tesnow, Reformed Episcopalian, of Denver, Colorado:—

“It is a matter of deep public concern, as well as that of the church, how the masses are to be employed who are let loose upon the sabbath [Sunday]. If they be allowed to be tempted to idleness, vice, and dissipation, no day in the calendar of the week will equal it in 'impairing health, promoting vice, increasing pauperism, unsettling society,' and opening the flood-gates for sin and degradation in general.”

Here is something for Sunday-law people to think about. Were it not for Sunday laws many would be employed in labor no morally worse on Sunday than on Monday. The effort to close all places of business on Sunday enforces idleness upon a large class who have no desire to read or go to church. The next logical step for Sunday-law people to take will be to secure a law to compel attendance on religious services. And then will come the question of what church, which the secular authorities will perforce have to decide, and thus would follow the fullest fledged union of Church and State, with all its concomitant evils. The evils created by a full working Sunday-law régime are endless. We commend the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a substitute worthy of the trial of these Sunday-law agitators.